Violinist Hilary Hahn will perform at the New Jersey Performing Arts Center and the McCarter TheatrePeter Miller

An intricately carved wooden piano, a music stand shaped like a lyre and guests milling around drinking champagne while they waited to hear new violin music all could have fit into a salon concert a century ago.

Then Hilary Hahn took the center stage spot in the Upper West Side living room and began to play a piece titled “Angry Birds of Kauai,” by Jeff Myers, which the violinist commissioned as part of “27 Pieces: the Hilary Hahn Encores.”

As her bow grazed the strings and then struck them with enough intensity to snap the horsehair, the music called to mind rapid, maniacal beating of wings. Her pianist, Cory Smythe, chased along with colorful, percussive clusters of notes.

While the pyrotechnics could have gained approval from Liszt or Paganini, the harmonies, textures and rhythms were of a new breed. Tradition and cutting edge, jaw-dropping technique and cerebral challenge combined to make an elegant house concert a heart-racing event.

Even in encores, which could be considered the dessert of a concert program, Hahn doesn’t limit herself to simple comforts.

“If you start censoring what you’re interested in for the audience, you don’t give the audience enough credit,” Hahn said.

"The audience will find the artist who matches their interests. If you’re not being true to yourself, your audience can’t find you, because there’s a wall up between who you are and who they’re seeing.”

Exploration, she said, makes her a better musician — and why not be the best she can?

Hahn, 33, posed the question at an Upper West Side diner on the 23rd anniversary of her first recital. Years of seeking that kind of self-improvement and engaging her natural curiosity have made her one of the most sought-after violinists in the world.

Hahn began studying with Jascha Brodsky at the Curtis Institute of Music when she was 10 and made her first major orchestra appearance two years later with the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra.

Since her recording debut in 1998, she has released 14 albums, ranging from repertoire staples such as Bach, Beethoven and Tchaikovsky to 20th-century pieces by Schoenberg and Ives to new music. Two have won Grammy Awards. In the pop world, she has worked with the band “… And You Will Know Us By the Trail of Dead” and singer-songwriter Josh Ritter.

In Newark and Princeton next week, Hahn will perform the Chaconne from Bach’s Partita No. 1, Corelli’s Sonata No. 4 and Fauré’s Sonata No. 1 interspersed with the new encores.

“I really love playing the older stuff along with the new music because, in a way, it doesn’t matter when something was written,” she said. “The older music can be so relevant and so immediate, and touching and emotionally resonant. That’s exactly what new music can be, too.

“I don’t think there’s such a difference between older and newer music as there is between one composer and another.”

Tweets of a violin case

Although she began her performance career at a young age, Hahn rejects the “prodigy” label. On her website ( hilaryhahn.com ), which is full of quirky anecdotes, she points out that she completed college-level study before embarking on a full performance career at 17.

More about her touring life can be found on Twitter — she tweets from her violin case’s perspective with the appropriate handle @violincase.

For all the discipline her work entails, instinct has played a large role in her musical and professional choices. Integrity — to herself and to the music — seems to be a core value.

“Sometimes, I’m not sure why I wind up doing some of the things I do,” Hahn said of her diverse output.

“It’s like someone plopped you down in a life that looks like yours and feels like yours, but has some direction from somewhere else that you can’t pinpoint, and you just have to follow those directions.”

When she first picks up a score, she grapples with its structure and then studies its history — or interviews the composer — afterward.

“I try to get a connection to it and make my own conclusions, and then I’ll check that against what’s out there already,” she said.

“I can always change my ideas, but I can’t start from scratch later.”

An exploration

Hahn began the “Encores” project with the idea that a lot of classic encore favorites were quickly popular in their time, “but then we kept playing them.”

For months, she spent three or four hours at night exploring new music online. After choosing 26 pieces, she ran a competition in which she listened to 400 submissions — blindly, with no knowledge of their creators — before selecting Myers’ piece.

“I wasn’t looking for logical qualities,” she said. “I was more looking for stuff that spoke to me, that even if I wasn’t familiar with the musical language, somehow I found it beautiful or fascinating or something I wanted to work on.”

Learning the language of so many composers at once — which sometimes meant contending with semitones, unusual notation, or figuring out how to produce unfamiliar tonal effects — propelled her out of her comfort zone.

“That amount of mental challenge really pushed me to my limits,” she said. “And then I had to push beyond that.”

Hahn has interviewed the encores’ composers on her YouTube channel, posing the kinds of questions she has asked teachers and colleagues since her student days.

“In learning about how these different composers create, I’ve also learned about how other composers in the past might have created,” she said.

“The way they do it, why they do it, where they get their ideas, where their influences came from is all over the map. That made me realize a lot of the older composers were probably the same way — it’s really not as clear as it seems.”

Audience works hard

At NJPAC and the McCarter, the diverse encores will be interspersed with the other pieces rather than all at the end of the program. At her recent house concert, the new pieces included a work by avant-garde fixture Elliott Sharp that accelerated to pulse-quickening effect and a wrenchingly emotional work by Du Yun.

(For that performance, which was a benefit for the Special Music School at the Kaufmann Center in New York, Hahn and Smythe donated their performances.)

Of the Fauré, she said, “We thought that would be nice in the middle of this program, where people are going to be concentrating and processing a lot of new information, to hear something familiar and romantic.

“It sweeps everyone away.”

The Bach “Chaconne” is a piece she has performed since she was a teenager.

“I still do things in concerts with it that I’ve never done before,” she said.

“I don’t know how it’s possible. I would think I would’ve tried everything I could’ve thought up by now, but no,” she added with a gentle laugh.

Hahn tends to find inspiration in performance.

“There’s something about the adrenaline, the mind-set, the focus of a concert,” she said.
“It’s like a meditative state, but hyper-alert at the same time. I think that dichotomy creates a different way of thinking and the opportunity for new ideas.”

Of Bach’s music, which she performed at that first recital when she was 10, she added,

“People put a lot of emphasis on ‘understanding’ it, but I think you can play Bach so many different ways. It’s really more about having a relationship to it as a player than the intellectual heavyweight thing that people put on it.

“Just like any other piece, you can play it convincingly or you can not play it convincingly.”

Busy, busy, busy

In addition to the “Encores” project, Hahn is working on a new recording of Mozart’s Violin Concerto No. 5 and Viertemps’ Violin Concerto No. 4 with the Deutsche Kammerphilharmonie Bremen and Paavo Järvi. She also contin ues her regular orchestral engagements and performance with Hauschka, a German composer who uses electronics and specializes in prepared piano pieces. They released the album “Silfra” together last year.

“It’s always a juggling act,” Hahn said. “In school, I was always encouraged to work on almost more than I could keep track of. This feels like a continuation of that.”

“It’s an interesting time,” she added. “In a way it’s overwhelming, but in a way, it’s something I’ve been preparing for a long time. With all the things I’ve had to learn on this project, I’m not done learning yet.

“But I think they’ll all help me in the future for the new things that I might take on.”